A Swissair stewardess who missed a doomed flight last year cheated death a second time when she escaped being butchered by Hutu rebels in Uganda.

In September, 26-year-old Deanja Walther was on standby to join Swissair Flight 111 at JFK Airport, but she never made it on board.

The MD-11 jumbo jet crashed into the Atlantic off Nova Scotia shortly after taking off, killing all 229 passengers and crew – among them close friends of Walther.

To get over her pain, Walther, who lives in Zurich, took a dream vacation – tracking gorillas in Uganda.

On Monday, that dream became a nightmare.

She and 13 other tourists were kidnapped by machete-wielding Hutu rebels. After a forced march though a rain forest, eight were butchered with machetes and clubs. They included Rob Haubner and his wife, Susan Miller, of Hillsboro, Ore.

Six others, including Walther, escaped.

“I was thinking that I was in a film … a bad movie,” Walther, bursting into sobs, told reporters yesterday in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

“I was thinking I was going to be killed.

“I never believed people could kill people. I was thinking this was a movie … I was only praying I would get out of the situation.”

Walther got up early Monday because it was her turn to track the famed mountain gorillas at Bwindi National Park in eastern Uganda.

Suddenly, shots rang out in the valley where she was camped.

“I thought it was fireworks,” she said. “I had never heard gunfire in my life. I have never even touched a gun.”

Minutes later, three men appeared. Walther first thought they were there to help.

But as she looked into the eyes of one of the men, “I realized he was not friendly at all.”

Other men soon appeared. They were Hutu rebels, members of the dreaded Interahamwe militia responsible for the massacre of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

The rebels separated the 31 tourists into English- and French-speaking, but Walther didn’t want to leave a friend and insisted on staying with the English group.

It nearly cost her life.

The French-speaking group was released, but the English-speaking group was led on an eight-hour trek into the dense and humid jungle by 150 armed rebels.

Throughout the day, some members of the group were picked out and led away to be executed. At one point, Walther thought it was her turn.

“I felt someone grab me on my head. I started to cry,” she said.

But she was released and later found herself abandoned with five other survivors – including the friend she had risked her life to stay with – to make their way back to camp.